German Court Invalidates Samsung 3G Patent

Unless you have been a hermit for the last few years, surely you would know by now that Samsung and Apple are not the best of corporate friends, as they have brought each other to court numerous times in the past year alone across different continents due to patent disputes and lawsuits. It seems that the latest round of victory goes to the Cupertino firm, as a Federal Patent Court in Germany has invalidated what Samsung had deemed to be an essential patent for the UMTS 3G standard.

This particular invalidated patent covered “turbo encoding/decoding device and method for processing frame data according to QoS,” where the Federal Patent Court also did away with the patent protection on all of the proposed amendments to the original patent that was made by Samsung. Of course, the only recourse that Samsung has at the moment would be to appeal the ruling to the Federal Court of Justice, where that will take more time. I guess in this “war”, you win some, you lose some, as Apple did last week with the “slide to unlock” patent.